she’s just my type, american classic

Congratulations to Ken who won the Cleveland Food Rockscontest for his description on why Cleveland rocks. His six-word entry, “she’s just my type, American classic,” earned him $50 to Crop Bistro.

To be fair, I asked Jim Sollisch, creative director and writer extraordinaire where I work, to be the judge. He’s an incredibly gifted writer and I knew he would enjoy this.

As for the winner, Jim said he liked it because it’s a sentence, not a tag line, and therefore more interesting. If the assignment were just on food, Jim said he liked “foodie complicity, gourmet simplicity, every ethnicity.”

By the way, if Jim were to play along, his entry for why Cleveland rocks would have been: 5-bedroom house, 3 fireplaces, updated $209,000. “Hemingway had a great idea to use the for-sale genre— it really packs a lot of info in a few words,” he explained.

I thought there were a lot of great entries to choose from and am happy so many people played along. A lot of people focused on food and those ones were among my favorites. I liked: Mistake on the lake takes its cake (although it came in past the deadline); Symon, Bruell, Small, Whalen, Sawyer, Schimoler; One generation’s history is another’s inspiration and Live local, eat local, love local (that would be chef Eric Williams of Momocho who entered just for fun).